Your one-stop shop for all Changelog podcasts. Weekly shows about software development, developer culture, open source, building startups, artificial intelligence, shipping code to production, and the people involved. Yes, we focus on the people. Everything else is an implementation detail.
Building world-class developer experiences (Go Time #287)
Today we’re talking with Alice Merrick & Andy Walker about building a world-class developer experience. You know it when you see it, things just feel right. But it’s more than just a pleasant UI or lipstick on a pig (which is a saying), it really matters.
Changelog++ members get a bonus 5 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
- Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
- Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
- Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You iterlly can’t get any faster!
- Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Featuring:
- Alice Merrick – Twitter, LinkedIn
- Andy Walker – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
- Mat Ryer – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
- Kris Brandow – Twitter, GitHub
Show Notes:
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Timestamps:
(00:00) - It's Go Time!
(00:45) - Introducing the guests
(04:01) - What is the dev experience
(07:14) - Multimodal experience
(10:22) - Change aversion
(12:44) - Measuring time to fluency
(17:27) - Fonts
(23:28) - Cookie consent forms
(26:29) - Interactive docs
(32:17) - In-browser playground
(35:44) - Short comings of the playground
(40:51) - Sponsor: Changelog News
(42:54) - Patterns we don't like
(52:23) - Unpopular opinions!
(52:54) - Alice's unpop
(1:07:25) - Andy's unpop
(1:09:33) - Kris' unpop
(1:18:55) - Outro (BONUS++)